Animal
welfare activist and former hunter, Steve Hindi, is no stranger to
confrontation. As founding president of SHowing Animals Respect and
Kindness (SHARK), Hindi has gone to great lengths to stop animal
abuse.

His
methods have ranged from using ultralight aircraft to patrol for
poachers in wildlife sanctuaries to securing hidden video documenting
animal abuse at rodeos and targeting their big-name corporate
sponsors.

In
February of last year, Hindi positioned a boat on the Delaware River
outside the Philadelphia Gun Club in a quixotic attempt to prevent
members from shooting live pigeons that are catapulted out of boxes
and sometimes left to suffer slow and tortured deaths.

Despite his
efforts, the pigeon shooters were not thwarted. Hindi remained in the
boat as shots peppered the water and, according to his account, the
boat and Hindi himself.

The
stakes were raised on February 22, 2011 in Warminster, Pennsylvania,
when Hindi found himself facing the barrel of a semiautomatic
gun on a public roadway in broad daylight. What might otherwise sound
like a whopper of a tale was, in fact, video-documented by Hindi's
girlfriend and SHARK partner, Janet Enoch.

This
begs the question - why, three weeks after an incident in which
Warminster police and Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler
appear to have had ample time to sort through eyewitness interviews
and video evidence [see below], have no charges been filed or findings
made public?

We
know that the day began with a protest by SHARK activists outside
Carlton Pools on York Road in Warminster, PA. Carlton Pools is owned
by Joseph Solana, Jr. who is also the owner of Wing Pointe Hunting
Resort in Hamburg, PA where SHARK protested a live pigeon shoot a few
days earlier.

According
to an affidavit obtained by Opednews,
the protest was drawing to a close as planned around 1:00 pm when
events took a sudden and dangerous change of course.

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A
brief car chase, with Hindi following Carlton Pools operations
manager Robert Olsen, culminated in a face-to-face confrontation on
a well-trafficked public street with Olsen pulling a gun on Hindi.

Soon
after, both men dialed 911 charging assault by the other. As one
might expect, their stories begin to diverge within the first few
paragraphs of the five-page probable cause affidavit.

The
affidavit stated that Mr. Olsen had phoned police earlier in the day
complaining that Mr. Hindi had blocked one of the entrances to the
driveway of Carlton Pools. Olsen said that this caused him to, in turn, block one of the lanes on
York Road as he tried to enter the driveway.

The
document reveals that when officers responded to that call around
11:00 a.m., they spoke to Hindi who told them that a car had "entered
the parking lot at a high rate of speed and nearly struck him."

Subsequent
to the gun incident, Olsen provided new details to Detective James
Boston of the Warminster Police Department, stating that "Mr. Hindi
jumped into the path of his vehicle and that he was forced to come to
a stop."

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Mr.
Hindi's statements to Det. Boston regarding this event were
consistent with his earlier conversation with officers at the scene;
that Olsen nearly struck him at a high rate of speed.

Olsen
further described, in the affidavit, how he drove by the protesters once
as they were ending the protest and twice "slowly" as they
returned to their vehicles which were parked away from the business
on 10th
Street. He explained to the police that his intent was to document
the license plates of the protesters including Steve Hindi's white
van.

After
the third pass with his maroon Ford Expedition, Olsen stated that he
saw Hindi's white van "whip around" and that it was "obviously
coming after" him. Olsen went on to describe how he accelerated
rapidly, making various turns with the white van in pursuit. Olsen
acknowledged accelerating, "As best as my Ford will give me."